pyyaml VS cson

PyYAML knew about the breakage since january 2022[0], and nothing really happened. After a year and a half with lots of alphas and betas, I don't think there is much cython could do, short of fixing PyYAML themselves.

[0]: https://github.com/yaml/pyyaml/issues/601

They did finally change the default, in PyYAML 6, after many many bugs pointing out that their previous approach is broken (including one by yours truly), so the default is now safe.

Note some parsers, most notably pyyaml are still at yaml 1.1, because 13 years is just not enough time to update it.

That part of the YAML 1.2 spec is in conflict with reality, though. The base of YAML 1.1 documents is large enough that a backwards-incompatible change to default behavior is for practical purposes impossible.

YAML 1.1 was released in 2005, and 1.2 in 2009 -- only four years later. But here we are, in 2022, and YAML 1.1 is still the default (in many cases, only) version supported. That's why the "Norway problem" persists -- it's not possible for the parser to know whether an un-versioned YAML document containing "a: no" should parse the same as {"a": false} or {"a": "no"}.

Python (PyYAML) doesn't support 1.2 yet: https://github.com/yaml/pyyaml/issues/116

Ruby (Psych) ditto -- I can't even find a tracking issue to enable it.

Go (go-yaml) is a mixture of YAML 1.1 and 1.2, depending on the author's preferences.

Also, as a rough guideline, you can't have a backwards-incompatible revision of a versioned spec declare that it's the new default version, because that breaks all existing users.

Many parsers either default to YAML pre-1.2 or do not even expose a YAML 1.2 option. PyYAML has no 1.2 option, for example. So unless Ansible is using something other than PyYAML...

Relevant (open) PR: https://github.com/yaml/pyyaml/pull/555

Are you perhaps talking about decimal.Decimal? https://github.com/yaml/pyyaml/issues/255

I prefer JSON over YAML because I spend more time confused and burned by the problems caused by it.

I understand that people don't like directly use JSON because it's not very friendly: no comments, no multi-line string, etc.

A great alternative IMHO is cson[0]. It's like JSON to JavaScript but for CoffeeScript (though nobody talks about it nowadays). It has indentation-based syntax, comments, and multiline string which usually don't need to escape. The advantage is it's close enough to JSON which is the canonical format that everybody can agree on nowadays. For YAML and TOML there are too many visual part-aways from JSON.

Or just create a JSON variant that enables comments and the backtick multiline string from JavaScript.

[0] https://github.com/bevry/cson